Albert Wesker stared at the blinking cursor on the monitor like it had personally insulted him.

Forms. Shipment delays. Bio-weapon inventory charts with margins that didn’t even line up. He’d overseen the collapse of entire governments faster than Tricell could process a requisition order for Uroboros storage containment. And the smell—sterile as ever—pumped full of artificial citrus, like the office was trying too hard to convince him this wasn’t a fucking coffin lined with corporate tape.

He leaned back in the chair, leather groaning beneath the weight of a man built like an apex predator and dressed like he’d stepped out of a tailored funeral. His gloved fingers drummed along the desk, once, twice, thrice. The monitor blinked at him again.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he muttered under his breath, the words half-laced with venom, half-boredom. His own voice sounded tired of the bureaucracy.

A cup of something vaguely called coffee sat cold and untouched near the keyboard. That swill wasn’t going anywhere near his bloodstream. He had enough toxins in his body already without some intern’s piss-poor excuse for a pick-me-up. And still, he found his crimson eyes twitching toward it.

No. Not even desperation would bring him that low.

He stood abruptly, the chair rolled back a few inches in surrender. The view from the wide floor-length windows should have been calming—some deep jungle stretch out beyond the facility, trees swaying, life pulsing—but it just reminded him how slow everything moved. Life crawled. People bled at a snail’s pace. And this company—Tricell—operated like it was dragging a corpse uphill with one arm.

He turned from the window with a small curl of the lip. He was the future. Every time he came in here and played nice with a company that couldn’t even get an R&D report finished on time, it chipped away at the supremacy he had carved out for himself. The only reason he hadn’t burned the building down yet was because he still needed it. For now.

With a sharp exhale, he opened the desk drawer and pulled out a small vial. Jet black. Viscous. His version of an espresso shot.

He held it up against the soft light. It shimmered faintly. The virus purred beneath the surface. This… this was what made all the difference. Not that synthetic, bean-water bullshit. He twisted the cap with a crack and downed it without ceremony.

Warmth flooded his spine. Alertness surged. His mouth pulled into a satisfied smirk. Much better.

He sat again, typing now with new energy, slicing through lines of text like a scalpel. He didn’t read the reports so much as absorb them, pulling what he needed and discarding the rest. Most of the staff wrote like they were afraid of punctuation. Worthless.

Still, some corner of his mind itched.

He wanted action. He wanted chaos. Paperwork made him feel like a god wasting time at the DMV.

There was a knock at the door—light, almost timid. Some underling, no doubt, here to grovel about a missing shipment or ask for approval on something already doomed to fail.

He didn’t turn.

“Enter,” he said, the word slicing through the room like a blade.

God help whoever it was. He could use a little stress relief.